Artist: The Cynics

Pick Ya Pants Up EP by OTiS CLaPP

Banner by Cysquatch Welcome to the return of MetalSucks Question Of The Week, a (sorta) weekly survey of our staff on a recent hot-button issue that's rocking our metal planet. Fearless. Controversial. Half-baked. We give it to you straight every Friday afternoon. Okay not that straight. Here's this week's topic: Inspired by Terror frontman Scott Vogel's [...]

Filed under: News , New Music , Exclusive Brian Danielson Justin Ringle has come nearly full-circle on Cynic's New Year , the new album from his indie-folk band Horse Feathers . Ringle started playing quiet, rootsy songs when he moved from Idaho to Portland, Ore., to give himself a break from the loud-all-the-time rock-band dynamic he had spent years navigating. "I kind of burned out on that dynamic," Ringle [...]

Last week, Atheist frontman Kelly Shaefer kindly checked in with us to talk about his band's addition to dates on the awesome Death To All tour. And just like he does with Atheist's deceptively catchy jamz, Shaefer snuck into our gab a tantalizing detail for the attentive fan: Atheist is now preparing a follow-up to [...]

Horse Feathers - Where I'll Be Portland, Oregon based folk outfit Horse Feathers released their fourth studio album today, Cynic's New Year . The quintet has always had all of the pieces to make up a great folk group. The combination of fiddles, banjo and strings with lead singer Justin Ringle's rough but soothing voice have always made Horse Feathers' sound distinct. But on their fourth album, they have managed to fill out their sound. Instead of just the river, mountains, trees and valleys, we've got the full landscape. And it is beautiful. [...]

It's unfortunate that Horse Feathers ' Justin Ringle never gets lumped in with the rest of the indie folk A-list, among names like Robin Pecknold, Justin Vernon, or Sam Beam. The four records of breezy, ramshackle Americana he's released with the Portland outfit have been every bit as good as second-tier folk acts such as Bowerbirds and, at their best, have graced a similar strata of rustic beauty that's been the trademark of bands like Fleet Foxes. This fourth LP once again comes close to making that leap, but ultimately it falls just short of the mark. [...]

A tribute to late Death frontman Chuck Schuldiner and a fund-raiser for Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, the Death To All Tour also represents a convergence of tech-metal all-stars from Cynic, Death, and Sadus. And that was before last week's announcement that opening duties on the short trek will be split between Atheist and Gorguts. So [...]

On the band's fourth album, the tension between gorgeousness and grief gets a single line to sum it all up: "Beauty and loss, they are one and the same." Horse Feathers' new album, Cynic's New Year, comes out April 17. Read more »

Listen to the new audio from Psycho Realm presents: Sick Jacken & Cynic in Terror Tapes 2 . iTunes: Psycho Realm Presents: I'm Gone - Single - Psycho Realm

Yesterday, Vince noted that many of Relapse Records' most famous releases are now all available on Bandcamp, which means that not only can you instantly download legal, high-quality versions for affordable prices, but in many cases, you can stream them in full free of charge, too. Which, needless to say, is a great idea. "Other metal [...]

This week's skyscraping pile of awesome new heavy shit requires two shovels, so I woke Senior Editor Anso DF from his post-weekend coma to help me scoop-and-toss all this hot, stinky metal into your ears and eyes. You'll thank us. Just plug your nose and dive deep into a double-load of Shit That Comes Out Today right [...]

• Black Breath - 6. Mother Abyss

MetalSucks recently polled its staff to determine The Top 25 Modern Metal Drummers, and after an incredible amount of arguing, name calling, and physical violence, we have finalized that list! The only requirements to be eligible for the list were that the musician in question had to a) play metal (duh), b) play drums (double-duh), [...]

For fans of prog, tech metal, and all things awesome, the idea Obscura covering a classic Cynic track from 19932s Focus probably sounds too boneriffic to be true. But it's a really real thing: as part of their upcoming release, Illegimitation - a collection of the band's earliest recordings from 2003, unreleased songs from 2006′s Cosmogenesis sessio ns, and covers recorded by their [...]

It's no secret how much I admire the music that Cynic creates. Any reader of the site would know that. I was quite excited to learn last year that the band would have been putting out a new EP, Carbon Based Anatomy, and it ruled! While interviewing the band on the promotional cycle for the ...

In the absence of actual new music or substantial information of some kind, I find it kinda hard to get psyched up about the announcement of an album release date in all but a few special cases. But there have been a number of big release date announcements and rumors in the past few days, [...]

"WHAT?! So the secret identity of Portal was Cynic all along?" Nah, it just so happens that the very American progressive rock band, Cynic, used to be called Portal way back in the mid-'90s. That was around the same period the Australian Portal came into existence, but I bet the two didn't even know that ...

No, not that Portal. Here's a pretty major lapse in my metal education: I somehow had no idea that there was a Cynic "off-shoot" project called Portal, which combines the talents of Paul Masvidal, Sean Reinert, guitarist Jason Gobel, bassist Chris Kringel, and vocalist Aruna Abrams. There's even some demos already up on YouTube (like the one above), so really, seriously, [...]

Van Cynic had ik eigenlijk altijd het idee dat het zich in metalsferen bevond die niet de mijne zijn. Pas door Jeff Wagners uitstekende boek Mean Deviation - Four Decades of Progressive Heavy Metal kwam ik erachter dan Cynic in...

Meditation location #31 - CBA tour - Amstelveen - I found a park across from the venue where I sat next to a small pond. Reflecting in the water directly in front of me was an upside down tree. I immediately saw in it the classic 'Sephiroth' from Kabbalistic (Jewish mysticism) teachings. Also known as [...]

Cynic's Paul Masvidal has been chronicling the band's U.S. and European Carbon-Based Anatomy tour as part of his Metta Mind Journal column here on MetalSucks over the past few days. Check out previous entries here. Today's meditations come from the band's tour stops in Copenhagen and Hamburg. Meditation location #29 - CBA tour - Lyngsby / Copenhagen, Denmark - Sold [...]